American Economic Association
Why Europe and the West? Why Not China?
Author(s): David S. Landes
Source: The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Spring, 2006), pp. 3-22
Published by: American Economic Association
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Journal of Economic Perspectives-Volume 20, Number 2-Spring 2006-Pages 3-22
Why Europe and the West? Why Not
China?
David S. Landes
The
The world history of technology is the story of a long, protracted inversion.
As late as the end of the first millennium of our era, the civilizations of
Asia were well ahead of Europe in wealth and knowledge. The Europe of
what we call the Middle Ages (say, tenth century) had regressed from the power
and pomp of Greece and Rome, had lost much of the science it had once possessed,
had seen its economy retreat into generalized autarky. It traded little with other
societies, for it had little surplus to sell, and insofar as it wanted goods from outside,
it paid for them largely with human beings. Nothing testifies better to deep poverty
than the export of slaves or the persistent exodus of job-hungry migrants.
Five hundred years later, the tables had turned. I like to summarize the change
in one tell-tale event: the Portuguese penetration into the Indian Ocean led by
Vasco da Gama in 1498. This was an extraordinary achievement. Some scholars will
tell you that it was some kind of accident; that it could just as easily have been
Muslim sailors, or Indian, or Chinese to make the connection from the other
direction. Did not the Chinese send a series of large fleets sailing west as far as the
east African coast in the early fifteenth century--bigger, better and earlier than
anything the Portuguese had to show?
Don't you believe it. These affirmations of Asian priority are especially prominent and urgent nowadays because a new inversion is bringing Asia to the fore. A
"multicultural" world history finds it hard to live with a eurocentric story of
achievement and transformation. So a new would-be (politically correct) orthodoxy
would have us believe that a sequence of contingent events (gains by Portugal and
then others in the Indian Ocean, followed by conquests by Spain and then others
in the New World) gave Europe what began as a small edge and was then worked
up into centuries of dominion and exploitation. A gloss on this myth contends that
m David S. Landes is Emeritus Professor of Economics, Harvard University, Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
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4 Journal of Economic Perspectives
a number of non-European societies were themselves on the edge of a technological and scientific breakthrough; that in effect, European tyranny (to paraphrase
Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"), "froze the genial current
of the [Asian] soul."
A variant on this history-as-accident (or luck) is the pendulum approach
associated with Jack Goody's (1996) book, East in the West. Everything starts on an
even keel thanks to the allegedly common heritage of the Bronze Age; but then
different parts move ahead, only to be caught up and passed by others, which then
lose ground to their predecessors. So Europe was just especially lucky, taking the
lead at the crucial turn to the Industrial Revolution. But Asia's turn will now come;
indeed is already coming. As Goody (pp. 231-232) writes: "[I] t is a pendular
movement that continues today, with the East now beginning to dominate the West
in matters of the economy." As for efforts to understand this European successespecially explanations based on allegedly deep characteristics that were present in
Europe but wanting in China-such efforts are irrelevant, writes Goody (p. 238):
... since all these features must have been present [in China] at the earlier
period. Those discussions can be seen for what they are, as representing the
understandable but distorting tendency of Europeans to inflate their overall
contribution to world society and even to 'Western civilisation', a tendency
reinforced by their undoubted achievements over the past few centuries. Such
inflation of oneself inevitably involves the deflation of others; self-congratulation
is a zero-sum game.
But of course, Westerners were not alone in noticing some European deep
characteristics. Thus Abu Talib, an Indian Muslim visitor to Britain late eighteenth
century, commenting on British precocity in mechanization: "The British," he
wrote (cited in Khan, 1998, p. 303), "were endowed with a natural passion for
technical innovation. They possessed inventive skills and preferred to perform even
minor routine jobs with the aid of mechanical instruments rather than manually.
They had such great passion for the use of technical instruments that they would
not perform certain tasks unless the necessary instruments were at their disposal."
The French, he went on, were not like that.1
I shall return later to this revisionist debate. Here, suffice to say: 1) The
Portuguese success was the result of decades of rational exploration and extension
of navigational possibilities in an ocean (the south Atlantic) that was hostile to
traditional techniques of navigation, which essentially involved following the coast-
line. This technological enhancement rested in turn on a systematic utilization of
astronomical observations and calculations, taken from the Muslims and transmitted largely by Jewish intermediaries, which allowed the Portuguese to follow winds
and currents across the south Atlantic, and then use a knowledge of latitude to
swing back around the tip of Africa and into the Indian Ocean. 2) The Chinese
1 Khan (1998, p. 328, n. 122) notes further that the Arabic lacked the vocabulary needed to speak of
factory manufacture or machinery. For the latter, Abu Talib used "wheels and tools."
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David S. Landes 5
abandonment of westward exploration was partly the result of contingen
events; but at bottom it reflected the values and structures of Chinese s
civilization. 3) European exploitation of the breakthrough rested on a di
power technology (better powder and better guns) as well as on na
superiority.
The extension of European power into other parts of the world
expression of these and other disparities. Why other regions did not ke
Europe is an important historical question, for one learns almost as m
failure as from success. It is not possible in brief compass, of course, to
question for every non-European society or civilization; but three d
serious reflection: Islam, China, and India. I shall focus in this essay on
The First Chance: Science without Development
The one civilization that was in a position to match and even antici
European achievement was China. China had two chances: first, to
continuing, self-sustaining process of scientific and technological advan
basis of its indigenous traditions and achievements; and second, to lear
European science and technology once the foreign "barbarians" entered
nese domain in the sixteenth century. China failed both times.
The first failure has elicited much scholarly inquiry and analysis. An
remains an abiding mystery. The China specialists tell us, for example
number of areas of industrial technique, China long anticipated Europe: i
where the Chinese had a power-driven spinning machine in the thirteent
some 500 years before the England of the Industrial Revolution knew wa
and mules; or in iron manufacture, where the Chinese early learned to u
probably coke (as against charcoal) in blast furnaces for smelting iron
turning out perhaps as many as 125,000 tons of pig iron by the later
century--a figure not achieved by Britain until 700 years later (Elvin, 19
In general, one can establish a long list of instances of Chinese pri
wheelbarrow, the stirrup, the rigid horse collar (to prevent choking), th
paper, printing, gunpowder, porcelain. (But not the horse-shoe, which im
the Chinese did not make use of the horse for transport.)
The mystery lies in the failure of China to realize the potential of som
most important of these inventions. One generally assumes that know
know-how are cumulative and that a superior technique, once known,
2 Elvin (1973) gives the figure as "between 35,000 to 40,000 tons and 125,000 tons," but sa
the higher estimate. He relies here on Yoshida Mitsukuni, aJapanese specialist writing in 196
Hartwell (1966, p. 34), also advances the higher figure. In Hall (1985, p. 46), this beco
125,000 tons." In this regard, Elvin (p. 285) quotes a description by Yen Ju-yu of iron w
Hupei/Shensi/Szechwan borders with blast furnaces 18 feet high, using charcoal and ha
bellows (more than ten persons relaying one another) and working continuously. Th
apparently used for castings, and there is no indication of further refining as either wro
steel.
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6 Journal of Economic Perspectives
nate older methods and remain in use. But Chinese industrial history offers a
number of examples of technological regression and oblivion. The machine to spin
hemp was never adapted to the manufacture of cotton; cotton spinning was never
mechanized; and coal/coke smelting was allowed to fall into disuse, along with the
iron industry. Why, asks Elvin (1973, pp. 297-298)?
It would seem that none of the conventional explanations tells us in convinc-
ing fashion why technical progress was absent in the Chinese economy during a
period that was, on the whole, one of prosperity and expansion. Almost every
element usually regarded by historians as a major contributory cause to the Industrial Revolution in north-western Europe was also present in China. There had even
been a revolution in the relations between social classes, at least in the countryside;
but this had had no important effect on the techniques of production. Only
Galilean-Newtonian science was missing; but in the short run this was not important. Had the Chinese possessed, or developed, the seventeenth-century European
mania for tinkering and improving, they could easily have made an efficient
spinning machine out of the primitive model described by Wang Chen. A steam
engine would have been more difficult; but it should not have posed insuperable
difficulties to a people who had been building double-acting piston flame-throwers
in the Sung dynasty. The crucial point is that nobody tried. In most fields, agricul-
ture being the chief exception, Chinese technology stopped progressing well
before the point at which a lack of scientific knowledge had become a serious
obstacle.
Why indeed? Sinologists have put forward several partial explanations. Those
that I find most persuasive are the following.
First, China lacked a free market and institutionalized property rights. The
Chinese state was always stepping in to interfere with private enterprise-to take
over certain activities, to prohibit and inhibit others, to manipulate prices, to exact
bribes. At various times the government was motivated by a desire to reserve labor
to agriculture or to control important resources (salt and iron, for example); by an
appetite for revenue (the story of the goose that laid the golden eggs is a leitmotif
of Chinese history); by fear and disapproval of self-enrichment, except by officials,
giving rise in turn to abundant corruption and rent-seeking; and by a distaste for
maritime trade, which the Heavenly Kingdom saw as a diversion from imperial
concerns, as a divisive force and source of income inequality in the ecumenical
empire, and worse yet, as an invitation to exit. This state intervention and interference encountered evasion and resistance; indeed, the very needs of state compelled a certain tolerance for disobedience. Still, the goal, the aim, the ideal was the
ineffable stillness of immobility. When in 1368 the new Chinese emperor inaugu-
rated a native (Ming) dynasty to replace the defeated Mongol invaders, he ascended the throne in Nanjing as the Hongwu ("Vast Martial") emperor. Let not the
name deceive the reader: Hongwu's goal was anything but war. He wanted rather
to immobilize the realm. People were to stay put and move only with the permission
of the state-at home and abroad. People who went outside China without permission were liable to execution on their return. The Ming code of core laws also
sought to block social mobility, with severe penalties for thosejumping professional
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Why Europe and the West? Why Not China? 7
and occupational barriers. In this regard, Timothy Brook (1998, p. vii) cites in
epigraph one of the Hongwu emperor's favorite moral dicta:
Let the state be small and the people few;
So that the people... fearing death, will be reluctant to move great
distances
And, even if they have boats and carts, will not use them.
So that the people... will find their food sweet and their clothes
beautiful,
Will be content with where they live and happy in their customs.
Though adjoining states be within sight of one another and cocks crowing and dogs barking in one be heard in the next,
Yet the people of one state will grow old and die without having had any
dealings with those of another.
These matters reached a wretched climax under the Ming dynasty (1368-1644),
when the state attempted to prohibit all trade overseas.3 Such interdictions led of
course to evasion and smuggling, with concomitant corruption (protection
money), searches for contraband, confiscations and punishment. All of this necessarily acted to strangle initiative, to increase risk and the cost of transactions, and
to chase talent from commerce and industry.
A second reason why China did not realize the economic potential of its
scientific expertise involved the larger values of the society. The great HungarianGerman-French sinologist, Etienne Balazs (1968 [1988]; see also Balazs, 1964), saw
China's abortive technology as part of a larger pattern of totalitarian control. He
recognizes the absence of freedom, along with the weight of custom and consensus
and what passed for higher wisdom. His analysis (pp. 22-23) is worth repeating:
... if one understands by totalitarianism the complete hold of the State and
its executive organs and functionaries over all the activities of social life,
without exception, Chinese society was highly totalitarian.... No private
initiative, no expression of public life that can escape official control. There
is to begin with a whole array of state monopolies, which comprise the great
consumption staples: salt, iron, tea, alcohol, foreign trade. There is a monopoly of education, jealously guarded. There is practically a monopoly of letters
(I was about to say, of the press): anything written unofficially, that escapes
the censorship, has little hope of reaching the public. But the reach of the
3 The imperial authorities vacillated in their attitude to foreign trade, now favoring it, now clamping
down; and these tergiversations were in themselves a deterrent to stable enterprise and capital accumulation. In addition, even when the state relented, it did so in circumstances that pushed the traders
into illicit operations. Thus, the early Mongol (Yuan) dynasty (1280-1368) allowed freedom of enterprise, but then succumbed to the temptation of instituting a licensing system. This enabled officials to
play the role of capitalist, financing venturers and dividing profits 70-30: 70 for the official, 30 for the
working trader. That was greedy, compared to the typical European 50-50 split. The traders presumably
sought to conceal gains, but in the long run, trade had to suffer.
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8 Journal of Economic Perspectives
Moloch-State, the omnipotence of the bureaucracy, goes much farther. There
are clothing regulations, a regulation of public and private construction
(dimensions of houses); the colors one wears, the music one hears, the
festivals-all are regulated. There are rules for birth and rules for death; the
providential State watches minutely over every step of its subjects, from cradle
to grave. It is a regime of paper work and harassment, endless paper work and
endless harassment.
The ingenuity and inventiveness of the Chinese, which have given so
much to mankind-silk, tea, porcelain, paper, printing, and more-would no
doubt have enriched China further and probably brought it to the threshold
of modern industry, had it not been for this stifling state control. It is the State
that kills technological progress in China. Not only in the sense that it nips in
the bud anything that goes against or seems to go against its interests, but also
by the customs implanted inexorably by the raison d'Etat. The atmosphere of
routine, of traditionalism, and of immobility, which makes any innovation
suspect, any initiative that is not commanded and sanctioned in advance, is
unfavorable to the spirit of free inquiry.
In short, to go back to Elvin (1973), the reason the Chinese did not develop
based on their scientific knowledge is that no one was trying. Why try? Especially
since the Chinese were not without their own quiet resources to thwart bureaucratic
interferences and frustrations-reliance on personal and familial collaboration, for
example, in place of arbitrary or institutional practice in business. In such matters,
personal trust could yield more dependable performance than legal rules.
In all this, the contrast with Europe was marked. Where fragmentation and
national rivalries compelled European rulers to pay heed to their subjects, to
recognize their rights and cultivate the sources of wealth, the rulers of China had
a free hand. Again Elvin (1973, pp. 224-225) captures some of this:
... it was the great size of the Chinese Empire which made the adoption of
the policies of the Ming emperors possible. In a Chinese subcontinent made
up of smaller independent states, like those of the Five Dynasties [907-960
C.E.] or the Ten Kingdoms, no government could have afforded to close itself
off. International economic interdependence (as that between regions would
have become) would have removed this option; and the need for diplomatic
and military alliances, and revenue from foreign trade, would have made
isolationism undesirable. With smaller states, there might also have been, as
there was in north-western Europe in early modern times, a closer conscious
identification of the governed with their countries and rulers. Prior to modern communications, the immensity of the empire precluded nationalism.
Whatever the mix of factors, the result seems to have been a curious pattern of
isolated initiatives and sisyphean discontinuities-up, up, up and then down
again-almost as though the society were constrained by a homeostatic braking
mechanism or held down by a silk ceiling. The result, if not the aim, was a kind of
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David S. Landes 9
change-in-immobility; or maybe immobility-in-change. Innovation was allow
go (was able to go) so far and no farther.4
The Europeans knew much less of these interferences. Instead, they en
during these centuries into an exciting world of innovation and emulation
challenged and tempted vested interests and kept the forces of conser
scrambling. Changes were cumulative, news of novelty spread fast and a new
of progress and achievement replaced an older, effete reverence for authorit
intoxicating sense of freedom touched (infected) all domains. These were ye
heresies in the church, of popular initiatives that, we can see now, anticipat
rupture of the Reformation; of new forms of expression and collective actio
challenged the older organization of society and posed a threat to other polit
new ways of doing and making things that made newness a virtue and a sou
delight.
Important in all this was the role of the Christian church in Europe as
custodian of knowledge and school for technicians. One might have expected
otherwise: that organized spirituality, with its emphasis on prayer and contemplation, would have had little interest in technology; and that with its view of labor as
penalty for original sin, it would have had no concern to save labor. And yet
everything seems to have worked in the opposite direction: The desire to free
clerics from time-consuming earthly tasks led to the introduction and diffusion of
power machinery and, beginning with the Cistercians in the twelfth century, to the
hiring of lay brothers (conversi) to do the dirty work, which led in turn to an
awareness of and attention to time and productivity. All of this gave rise on
monastic estates to remarkable assemblages of powered machinery--complex sequences designed to make the most of the water power available and distribute it
through a series of industrial operations. A description of the abbey of Clairvaux in
the mid-twelfth century (cited in White, 1978, p. 245-246) exults in this versatility:
"coquendis, cribrandis, vertendis, terendis, rigandis, lavandis, molendis, molliendis, suum
sine contradictione praestans obsequium." The author, clearly proud of these achievements, further tells his readers that he will take the liberty of joking (the medieval
clerical equivalent of, "if you'll pardon the expression"): the fulling hammers, he
says, seem to have dispensed the fullers of the penalty for their sins; and he thanks
God that such devices can mitigate the oppressive labor of men and spare the backs
of their horses.
Why this peculiarly European joy in discovery? This pleasure in the new and
better? This cultivation of invention-or what some have called "the invention of
invention"? Different scholars have suggested a variety of reasons, typically related
to religious values. One possible reason grows from theJudaeo-Christian respect for
manual labor, summed up in a number of biblical injunctions. One example will
suffice: when God warns Noah of the coming flood and tells him he will be saved,
it is not God who saves him. "Build thee an ark of gopher wood," says the Lord, and
4 For example, Max Weber (1922 [1951], as cited in Hall, 1985, p. 41) argued that the administrative
bureaucracy was undermanned, so that government came to know and respond to changes only after
they had gotten under way. Hence a pattern of "intermittent and jerky" homeostatic interventions.
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10 Journal of Economic Perspectives
Noah builds an ark to divine specifications. A second and related reason is the
Judaeo-Christian subordination of nature to man. This belief is a sharp departure
from widespread animistic beliefs and practices that saw something of the divine in
every tree and stream (hence the naiads and dryads). Ecologists today might say
these animistic beliefs were preferable to what was put in their place, but no one
was listening to pagan nature-worshipers in Christian Europe. A third reason stems
from the Judaeo-Christian sense of linear time. Other societies thought of time as
cyclical, returning to earlier stages and starting over again. Linear time can be
thought of as progressive or regressive, as moving on to better things or declining
from some earlier, happier state. For Europeans in our period, the progressive view
prevailed.
In the last analysis, however, I would stress the role of the market: the fact that
enterprise was free in Europe, that innovation worked and paid, that rulers and
vested interests were narrowly constrained in what they could do to prevent or
discourage innovation. Success bred imitation and emulation; also a sense of power
that would in the long run raise men almost to the level of gods. The old legends
remained-the expulsion from the Garden, Icarus who flew too high, Prometheus
in chains-to warn against hubris. The very notion of hubris--cosmic insolence-is
testimony to some men's pretensions and the efforts of others to curb them. But the
doers were not paying attention.
The Second Chance: Learning from the Barbarians
At the time the first Europeans arrived in the Indian Ocean and made their
way to China, the Celestial Empire as it was called was, at least in its own eyes, the
premier political entity in the world-first in size and population, first in age and
experience, untouchable in its cultural achievement, apparently imperturbable in
its sense of moral and spiritual superiority.5 The Chinese lived, as they thought, at
the center of the universe; around them, lesser breeds basked in their glow,
reached out to them for light, gained stature by doing obeisance and offering
tribute. Their emperor was the "Son of Heaven," the unique, godlike representative
of celestial power. Those few who entered his presence showed their awe by
kowtowing-kneeling and touching their head nine times to the ground; others
kowtowed to anything emanating from him-a letter, a single handwritten ideograph. The paper he wrote on, the clothes he wore, everything he touched partook
of his divine essence. Western diplomats allowed the Chinese to compel them to
these gestures, which they "considered an essential part of a tributary system of
foreign relations" (Spence, 1998, p. 42). By doing this, "the Westerners were
5 These Portuguese sailors of the sixteenth century were of course not the first Europeans to make their
way to China. The best known of the earlier visitors is Marco Polo, who came in the thirteenth century
from Venice, then the richest city in Europe, yet thought it a small town by comparison with what he saw
in Cathay.
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Why Europe and the West? Why Not China? 11
unwittingly shoring up the Qing court's views of China's superiority" (Spence citing
Wills, 1984).
Those who represented the emperor and administered for him were chosen
on the basis of competitive examinations in Confucian letters and morals. These
mandarin officials were in effect the embodiment of the higher Chinese culture,
invested with its prestige, imbued with its wholeness and sublime superiority. Their
self-esteem and haughtiness had ample room for expression and exercise on their
inferiors and were matched only by their "stunned submissiveness" and selfabasement to superiors (Welsh, 1993, p. 16, who in this case quotes without
reference). Nothing conveyed so well their rivalry in humility than the morning
audience, when hundreds of courtiers gathered from midnight on and stood about
in the open air, in rain and cold and fair, to wait for the emperor's arrival and
perform their obeisance. They were not wasting time; their time was the emperor's.
They could not afford to be late, and punctuality was not enough: unpunctual
earliness was proof of zeal (Landes, 1983; see also Huang, 1981).
Such cultural triumphalism combined with petty downward tyranny made
China a singularly bad learner. What was there to learn? This rejection of the
strange and foreign was the more anxious for the very force of the arrogance that
justified it. For that is the paradox of the superiority complex: it is an expression of
insecurity. It is intrinsically brittle; those who nourish it, need it, and depend on it
are also those who fear nothing so much as contradiction. The French today are so
persuaded of the superiority of their language that they dither and tremble at the
prospect of a borrowed word, especially if it comes from English. The same holds
for Ming China: they were so convinced of their ascendancy that they quaked
before the challenge of Western technology, which was there for the learning.
The irony is that those first Portuguese visitors and Catholic missionaries used
the wonders of western technology to charm their way into China. The mechanical
clock was the key that unlocked the gates. The mechanical clock was a European
mega-invention of the late thirteenth century, crucial not only for its contribution
to temporal discipline and productivity, but its susceptibility of improvement and its
role at the frontier of instrumentation and mechanical technique. The water clock
is a dunce by comparison. For the Chinese in the sixteenth century, the mechanical
clock came as a wondrous machine capable not only of keeping time but of
amusing and entertaining. Some clocks played music; others were automata with
figurines that moved rhythmically at intervals. Clocks, then, were the sort of thing
that the emperor would want to see, that had to be shown him if only to earn his
favor, that a zealous courtier had to show him before someone else did. But that was
not so easy. This magical device had to be accompanied. Where all Chinese
instincts and practice dictated that foreigners should be kept at a distance, confined
to some peripheral point like Macao and allowed to proceed to the center only by
exception, the clock, in its sixteenth-century avatar, needed its attendant clockmaker and keepers.
The Chinese loved clocks and watches. They were less happy, though, with
their European attendants. The problem here was the Chinese sense of the wholeness of culture, the link between things, people and the divine. The Catholic priests
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12 Journal of Economic Perspectives
who first brought them these wonderful machines were salesmen of a special kind.
They sought to convert the Chinese to the one true God, the trinitarian God of the
Roman church, and the clocks were not only an entry ticket but an argument for
the superiority of the Christian religion. Were not those who could make these
things, who possessed all kinds of special astronomical and geographical knowledge
to the bargain, were they not superior in the largest moral sense? Was not their faith
truer, wiser? The Jesuits were prepared to make such an argument, stretching the
while the rules and rites of the Church to fit the premises and win the sympathy of
an understandably skeptical Chinese elite. (The Chinese ideographs for ancestor
worship, for example, became the signifiers for the Christian mass.) But European
laymen made the argument as well. Here is Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (16461716), mathematician (coinventor of the calculus) and philosopher (as quoted in
Landes, 1983, p. 45, from a letter written circa 1675):
What will these peoples say [the Persians, the Chinese], when they see this
marvelous machine that you have made, which represents the true state of the
heavens at any given time? I believe that they will recognize that the mind of
man has something of the divine, and that this divinity communicates itself
especially to Christians. The secret of the heavens, the greatness of the earth,
and time measurement are the sort of thing I mean.
This argument, whether explicit or implicit, did carry occasionally. The Catholic missionaries had some small success, although they had trouble persuading
their open-minded "converts" to be good exclusivists (no other faith but the "true"
faith) in the European tradition. But most Chinese saw these pretensions for what
they were: an attack on Chinese claims to moral superiority, an assault on China's
self-esteem.
The response, then, had to be a repudiation or depreciation of Western
science and technology (Cipolla, 1967; Landes, 1983, chapter 2). Here is the K'ang
Hsi emperor, the most open-minded and curious of men in his pursuit of Western
ways, the most zealous in teaching them (as translated by Spence, 1974, p. 74):
" [E]ven though some of the Western methods are different from our own, and may
even be an improvement, there is little about them that is new. The principles of
mathematics all derive from the Book of Changes, and the Western methods are
Chinese in origin..."
That was the heart-warming myth. So the Chinese, who were not prepared to
give up clocks, who wanted clocks, who recognized their Western origin-these
same Chinese trivialized clocks as toys (which for many they were) or as nonfunc-
tional symbols of status, unaffordable by or inaccessible to most. Premodern
imperial China did not think of time knowledge as a personal right. The hour was
sounded by the authorities, and the right to own a timepiece was a rare privilege.
As a result, although the imperial court set up workshops to make clocks and got
their Jesuit clockmakers to train some native talent, these Chinese makers never
arrived at the level of Western horologists-for want of the best teachers and lack
of commercial competition and emulation. Nor did imperial China ever develop a
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David S. Landes 13
clockmaking trade comparable to that found in European countries. The
of pride (or indifference) shaped the Chinese response to European arm
Here was something that was anything but a toy. Cannons and musk
instruments of death, hence of power, and the Chinese had every reason t
themselves in these artifacts, the more so as the seventeenth century s
progressive dissolution of the Ming dynasty and the conquest of China by
people from the north. These were decades of war, and the balance of pow
well be tilted by access to these European inventions.
Yet the Chinese never learned to make modern guns. Worse yet, the
known and used cannon as early as the thirteenth century but had forgot
of what they had once known. Their city walls and gates had emplacem
cannon, but no cannon. Who needed them? The enemies of China did not have
them. Yet China did have enemies, without and within, and no European nation
would have been deterred from armament by enemy weakness; when it came to
death, as in so many other things, the Europeans were maximizers. European
technology was also monotonic-increasing: each gain was the basis for further gain.
The Chinese record of advance followed by regression, step-forward, step-back,
signaled an entirely different process. The Chinese, we are told, had a proverb: He
who does not go forward will go backward (Peyrefitte, 1992, p. 157). The saying was
apparently as much observation as prescription.6
So it was that in the seventeenth century, when the Portuguese in Macao
offered three cannon to the emperor by way of gaining favor, they had to send
three cannoneers along with them. Similarly, the Chinese hired on occasion
Portuguese musketeers to do some fighting for them, and they got their Jesuit
theologian-mechanicians to make them cannon. These cannon seem to have been
among the best the Chinese had, so good compared to the run-of-the-foundry
product that some were still in use in the nineteenth century, some 250 years later.
If most Chinese guns did not last that long, it was because they were notoriously
unreliable, more dangerous to the men who fired them than to the enemy. We even
have one report of the use of clumps of dried mud as cannonballs. These at least
had the merit of allowing the force of the explosion to exit by the mouth of the
tube. In general, the authorities frowned on firearms, perhaps because they
doubted the loyalty of their subjects (Cipolla, 1966, especially pp. 116-119).7 In
view of the inefficacy of these pieces, one wonders what they had to fear. Presumably the improvement that comes with use.
All of this may seem irrational to a means-ends oriented person, but it was not
quite that; the ends were different. The European may have thought that the
6 Students of the history of Chinese technology and science, most notably Joseph Needham and his
team, have made much of Chinese priority in discovery and invention, pushing the origins of important
techniques and devices far back, well before their appearance in Europe. They see this quite properly
as a sign of exceptional creativity and precocity, as discussed earlier in this paper, but they would do well
then to ask why the subsequent retreat and loss.
7 Cipolla (1966) is not a sinologist and had to rely exclusively on European sources, including the
testimony of Christian missionaries and travelers, but his "global vision" gives him crucial insights that
are missing in the specialist literature. Guns, Sails, and Empires is a remarkable book.
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14 Journal of Economic Perspectives
purpose of war was to kill the enemy and win; the Chinese, strong in space and
numbers, thought otherwise. Here is Mu Fu-sheng (1963, pp. 76-77, a pseudonym
cited in Cipolla, 1966, p. 120) on the imperial viewpoint:
... military defeat was the technical reason why Western knowledge should be
acquired, but it was also the psychological reason why it should not be.
Instinctively the Chinese preferred admitting military defeat, which could be
reversed, to entering a psychological crisis; people could stand humiliation
but not self-debasement .... The mandarins sensed the threat to Chinese
civilization irrespective of the economic and political issues, and they tried
resist this threat without regard to the economic and political dangers. In t
past the Chinese had never had to give up their cultural pride: the foreig
rulers always adopted the Chinese civilization. Hence there was nothing i
their history to guide them through their modern crisis.
Along with Chinese indifference to technology went imperviousness to Euro
science. The same conditions applied. The Jesuits and other Christian cl
brought in not only clocks but (sometimes obsolete) knowledge and ideas. Som
this was of interest to the court: in particular, astronomy and techniques of celes
observation were extremely valuable to a ruler who claimed a monopoly of
calendar and used his mastery of time to impose on the society as a whole.
Jesuits, moreover, trained gifted Chinese students who went on to do thei
work: mathematicians who learned to use logarithms and trigonometry and as
omers who prepared new star tables.
Little of this got beyond Peking, however, and the pride some took in the
learning was soon countered by a nativist reaction that reached back to
forgotten work of earlier periods. One leader of this return to the sources,
Ting (1635-1721), examined the texts of mathematicians who had worked u
the Song dynasty (10th-13th centuries) and proclaimed that the Jesuits ha
brought much in the way of innovation. Later on, his manuscripts were publ
by his grandson under the title "Pearls Recovered from the Red River" (as dis
in Taton, 1963-1966, volume 2, p. 592). The title was more eloquent than inte
by this time much of Chinese scientific "inquiry" took the form of raking a
sediment.
Meanwhile European science marched ahead, and successive churchmen
brought to China better knowledge than their predecessors (though still well
behind the frontier). Here, however, the churchmen were thwarted by the constraints of their mission. The Christian missionaries had laid so much stress on the
link between scientific knowledge and religious truth that any revision of the
former implied a repudiation of the latter. When in 1710 a Jesuit astronomer
sought to use new planetary tables based on the Copernican system, his superior
would not permit it, for fear of "giving the impression of a censure on what our
predecessors had so much trouble to establish and occasioning new accusations
against [the Christian] religion" (Taton, 1963-1966, volume 2, p. 590).
To recall these many instances of intellectual xenophobia is not to imply that
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Why Europe and the West? Why Not China? 15
all Chinese were hostile to European ideas. We know that a few far-sighted officials
and at least one emperor understood that the empire had much to gain by learning
new ways.8 They were thwarted, however, not only by the studied complacency of an
insecure superiority-also by a sense of completeness9-but by the intrigue of a
palace milieu where innovations were judged by their consequences for the balance
of power and influence. No proposals were made that did not incite resistance; no
novelties offered that did not frighten vested interests. At all levels, moreover, fear
of reprimand (or worse) outweighed the prospect of reward. A good idea brought
credit to one's superior; a mistake was invariably the fault of subordinates.
One consequence was a prudent, almost instinctive, resistance to change. This
is the heart of the matter: the response to difference and change. The Jesuit
missionary Louis Le Comte (1655-1728) deplored this conservatism (as quoted in
Cipolla, 1966, p. 120): "They are more fond of the most defective piece of antiquity
than of the most perfect of the modern, differing much in that from us [Europeans], who are in love with nothing but what is new." George Staunton, secretary to
what is called the Macartney embassy from Great Britain to China from 1792 to
1794, disheartened by Chinese indifference to suggestions for improvement of
their canals, lamented (Macartney, 1804, volume 6, p. 6), "In this country they
think that everything is excellent and that proposals for improvement would be
superfluous if not blameworthy." A half-century later a Christian friar, Evariste Huc
(1844-1846, volume 6, p. 81), discouraged perhaps by the sisyphean task of
missionizing, despairingly observed: "Any man of genius is paralyzed immediately
by the thought that his efforts will win him punishment rather than rewards."
Another consequence was a plague of lies and misinformation: officials wrote
and told their superiors what they wanted to hear; or what the subordinate thought
the superior would want to hear.1' The smothering of incentive and the cultivation
of mendacity are characteristic weaknesses of large bureaucracies, whether public
or private (business corporations). These are composed of nominal colleagues,
who are supposedly pulling together but in fact are adversarial players. What is
more, they compete within the organization, not in a free market of ideas, but in
a closed world of guile and maneuver. Here the advantage lies with those in place.
Reformers and subversives beware.
The rejection of foreign technology was the more serious because China itself
had long slipped into a regime of technological and scientific inertia, coasting
along on the strength of previous gains and slowly losing speed as a result of the
8 The curse of foreignness remained though. In a letter of November 1640, the Jesuit von Bell wrote:
"The word hsi [Western] is very unpopular, and the Emperor in his edicts never uses any word than hsin
[new]; in fact the former word in used only by those who want to belittle us" (Taton, 1963-1966,
volume 2, p. 589, n. 1).
9 For a discussion in this spirit, see Crone (1989, pp. 172-173): "China is a star example of a successful
civilization.... China reached the pinnacle of economic development possible under pre-industrial
conditions and stopped: no forces pushing it in a different direction are in evidence. ..."
10 This is one of the major contributions of Peyrefitte's (1992) book. Because he gained access to the
Chinese archives, including papers read and annotated by the emperor, Peyrefitte is able to show the
inner workings of bureaucratic equivocation and offer a valuable case study.
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16 Journal of Economic Perspectives
inevitable frictions of vested interest and diversion of talent and wealth into the
comfort and gratification of gentility. It has been argued that such retirements from
the fray should not deter ambitious newcomers; on the contrary, the prospect of
happy exits should encourage entry, and departures should make room for others.
But in most aristocratic societies, the availability of more esteemed careers seems to
divert talent from commerce and industry by offering short cuts to high status. The
withdrawal of successful merchants into land and office is seen as a logical promo-
tion, a legitimate escape. In such circumstances, the presence of groups precluded
by birth (thus merchants in Tokugawa Japan) or belief (Protestant dissenters in
England) from access to office and honors-the existence, in other words, of a
reserved pool of talent-may paradoxically be a strong contribution to otherwise
inhibited economic development.
Why Did China "Fail"?
One of the great mysteries of Chinese history is why China did not produce
from within the kind of scientific and industrial revolutions that gave Europe world
dominion. A thousand years ago, the Chinese were well ahead of anyone else and
certainly of Europe. Some would argue that this superiority held for centuries
thereafter. Why, then, did China "fail"?
Some China scholars would mitigate the pain by euphemism, as in Fairbank
and Reischauer (1960, p. 291, cited in Oshima, 1987, p. 34): "Chinese society,
though stable, was far from static and unchanging.., .the pace was slower.., .the
degree of change less.. ."" (True, but the issue remains.) Others would dismiss
the question as unanswerable or illegitimate. Unanswerable because it is said to be
impossible to explain a negative. (This is certainly not true in logic; the explanation
of large-scale failure and success is inevitably complicated, but that is what history
is all about.) Illegitimate because where is the failure? The very use of the word
imposes non-Chinese standards and expectations on China. (But why not? Why
should one not expect China to be interested in economic growth and development? To be curious about nature and want to understand it? To want to do more
work with less labor? The earlier successes of China in these respects make these
questions the more pertinent and acute.)
What about the relations between science and technology? Did the one matter
to the other? After all, science was not initially a major contributor to the European
Industrial Revolution, which was built largely on empirical technological advances
by practitioners. What difference, then, to Chinese practitioner technology if
science had slowed to a crawl by the seventeenth century?
The answer, I think, is that in both China and Europe, science and technology
were (and are) two sides of the same coin, two manifestations of a common
" Indeed, Fairbank and Reischauer (1960) suggest that the reason for Chinese "stability" was "the very
perfection that Chinese culture and social organization had achieved by the thirteenth century." The
contrast with Europe, roiling with imperfection, could not be sharper.
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David S. Landes 17
approach to problems and experience. The response to new knowledge of e
kind is of a piece, and the society that closes its eyes to novelty from one source
already been closing them to novelty from the other.
In addition, China lacked the institutions that made for a cumulative pr
of finding and learning: the schools, the academies, the learned societi
challenges and competitions. The sense of give-and-take, of standing on the
ders of giants, of collective as well as individual achievement, of an inherit
ever imperfect treasure, of progress-all of these were weak or absent in C
And this is another paradox. On the one hand, the Chinese formally wors
their intellectual ancestors; in 1734 an Imperial decree required court physic
make ritual sacrifices to their departed predecessors (Taton, 1963-1966, volu
p. 590). On the other, the Chinese showed a deplorable tendency to let the fi
of each new generation slip into oblivion, to be recovered perhaps at a lat
by antiquarian and archaeological research.12
The history of Chinese advances, then, is one of points of light, separat
space and time, unlinked by replication and testing, obfuscated by metapho
pseudo-profundity, limited in diffusion (with no technology for diffusion c
rable to European printing)-in effect, a succession of ephemera. Much
technical vocabulary was invented for the occasion and fell as swiftly into disuse
that later scholars spent much of their effort trying to decipher these oth
familiar ideograms. Much thought remained mired in metaphysical skepticis
speculation. Here Confucianism, with its easy disdain for scientific research,
it disparaged as "interventionist" and superficial, contributed its discouraging wo
A poem written in the early nineteenth century by the son of the then-p
minister, himself a high state dignitary, warned (as quoted in Taton, 1963
volume 2, p. 593): "With the microscope you see the surface of things. ...
not suppose you are seeing the things in themselves."13
The effect was discredit or indifference to science and technology, the g
for the want of mutual verification and support. This want of continuing in
tual exchange and reinforcement, this subjectivity, is what more than any
explains the uncertainty of scientific gains and the easy loss of impetus. Ch
savants had no way of knowing when they were right. It is subsequent rese
mostly Western, that has discovered and awarded palms of achievement to the m
inspired.
Small wonder that China reacted so unfavorably to European imports. European knowledge was not only strange and implicitly belittling. In its ebullience and
excitement, its urgency and competitiveness, its brutal commitment to truth and
efficacy (Jesuits excepted), it went against the Chinese mindset.
12 This ongoing slippage happened in spite of considerable effort to collect knowledge and present it in
encyclopedias. One such project, really a kind of anthology, may well have been the biggest project of
its kind ever attempted: 800,000 pages (Spence, 1990, p. 86). But a plethora of encyclopedias is a bad
sign: like still photographs, they are an effort to fix knowledge at a point of time. They are useful as
reference works, especially for historians, but they can impede free inquiry.
13 Of course, when the time came, one could find support in Confucianism for other positions. That is
the nature of sacred writ: one can quote it to one's purpose.
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18 Journal of Economic Perspectives
So the years passed, and the decades, and the centuries. China saw Europe
leave it far behind. At first China was unbelieving and contemptuous. Later it
became increasingly anxious and frustrated. From asking and begging, the Westerners became insistent and impatient. The British sent two embassies to China
seeking improved trade relations: one headed by George Macartney in 1792 and a
second headed by William Pitt Amherst in 1816. An underlying difficulty was that
the Chinese were happy to sell to the British, but it was very difficult for the British
to sell to the Chinese, except for silver and opium. After a series of diplomatic and
trade confrontations, the First Opium War started in 1839. The British victory in
that war resulted in the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, which opened up Chinese ports
to British ships, reduced Chinese tariffs on British goods, and ceded Hong Kong to
the British.
"There is Nothing We Lack"
Now England is paying homage.
My Ancestors' merit and virtue must have reached their distant shores.
Though their tribute is commonplace, my heart approves sincerely.
Curios and the boasted ingenuity of their devices I prize not.
Though what they bring is meager, yet,
In my kindness to men from afar I make generous return,
Wanting to preserve my good health and power.
Poem by the Qienlong Emperor on the occasion of the Macartney
embassy (1793)
The Empire of China is an old, crazy, first rate man-of-war, which a
fortunate succession of able and vigilant officers has contrived to keep
afloat these one hundred and fifty years past, and to overawe their
neighbours by her bulk and appearance, but whenever an insufficient
man happens to have the command upon deck, adieu to the discipline
and safety of the ship. She may perhaps not sink outright; she may drift
some time as a wreck, and will then be dashed to pieces on the shore; but
she can never be rebuilt on the old bottom.
George, Lord Macartney to his journal (cited in Welsh, 1993, p. 33)
The Chinese policy of superior indifference to Western things has been
traditionally summed up in the dismissive letter of the Qienlong emperor (reigned
1736-1795) to George III, rejecting the British request of 1793 for trading rights
and a permanent legation in Peking: "We have never set much store on strange and
ingenious objects, nor do we need any more of your country's manufactures." So
much for scientific instruments and technological devices. That is what I would call
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Why Europe and the West? Why Not China? 19
ization of foreign art and artifacts during these centuries of active contact (1550-
1900). Thus, the Qienlong Emperor's successor, receiving and dismissing Macartney's successor Lord Amherst in 1816, told him in effect to get lost: "My dynasty
attaches no value to products from abroad; your nation's cunningly wrought and
strange wares do not appeal to me in the least" (as quoted in Sahlins, 1988,
pp. 10-11). These explicit expressions of contempt, coming as they did from the
emperor himself, leave little room for extenuation. The historian, even the apologist, must deal with them-as the British had to. (They came back in 1839 with
gunboats.)
Yet the argument has now been put forward that these back-of-the-hand
dismissals were not a rejection of Western knowledge, but rather messages for
internal consumption. The Manchu dynasty then ruling China was foreign, its
legitimacy open to question. It could not afford to nourish its enemies by admitting
to a lack of autonomy, an inferiority to other outsiders. (This very fear of yielding-
the definition of learning as weakness!-is testimony in my opinion to cultural
defensiveness and introversion.) In fact, this thesis continues, the Chinese were very
much interested in Western techniques and artifacts, especially in the military
realm. What they did not want to import was European ideologies; and these two,
technology and ideology, were closely linked. It was the Christian missionaries who
had done that, using, as we have seen, European knowledge and devices to suggest
the superiority of European religion (Waley-Cohen, 1993). But this argument is not
sustained by the facts nor is it persuasive in logic.
As to the facts: the Chinese long preceded the Europeans in the use of
explosive powder, whether for display (fireworks) or use in weapons. Yet a study of
their armament reveals a singular inability to enhance, by implication an indifference to, the destructive capacity of their bombards and cannon, to the point where
they wreaked more fright than damage. Their very names bore witness to their
inefficacy: thus we have the "nine-arrows, heart-penetrating, magically poisonous
fire-thunderer," a tube designed to blow a cluster of arrows in the direction of the
enemy. Joseph Needham (1979) recognizes that these could not have gone very far,
"since the gunpowder was not exerting its full propellant force." But he conjectures
that they might have some effect in close combat against lightly armored or
unshielded personnel. Or the "eight-sided magical, awe-inspiring wind-and-fire
cannon," a vase-shaped bombard used to blow rubble and rubbish. Too bad those
opposing these devices could not be told of their potent, magical, awe-inspiring
names; they might have surrendered on the spot.14
Nor can one demonstrate a sustained and effective interest in European
military technology by pointing to occasional instances of recourse to advice and
14 The Chinese use of hyperbole in describing weaponry seems to be a convention, and historians would
be well advised to contain their credulity. We have an account of firearms and explosives in the later
Ming period that speaks of cannon that "when they strike a city wall can reduce it instantly to rubble";
and of bombards whose sighting devices are so accurate that one "might pick off a general or remove
a prince," as quoted in Elvin (1973, p. 94). For critical comments on the value of this weaponry, see Sivin
(1978, p. 468). Elvin in fact is reasonably skeptical, if only because he wants to know why the Chinese
started so fast and then slowed down.
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20 Journal of Economic Perspectives
technique from Jesuit missionaries. These good clerics were ready, in the cause of
propagation of the faith (O Lord, what great things are done in thy name!), to
teach the Chinese how to make and aim cannon. Adam Schall did this for the
failing Ming dynasty, producing over 500 pieces of light artillery; and his suc
Ferdinand Verbiest made another 500 over a period of 15 years (so two or th
month) for the Manchus. This small output-all the smaller because these gu
had a deplorable tendency to blow up-found use on and off, remaining
important part of the imperial arsenal until the end of the [Qing] dynasty" i
twentieth century. Similarly, we are told, a work on gunnery written by Sch
collaboration with a Chinese colleague and published in 1643 was revived
reprinted in 1841 at the time of the Opium War (Waley-Cohen, 1993, pp. 1
1532).
Yet such longevity bespeaks a scarcely changing technology. What we have
other words, is an accomplishment here, an event there, the import of a pie
knowledge and its sterilization. The contrast with the systematic, tireless pursuit
improved gun manufacture and gunnery in Europe, which enlisted the effor
military and scientists, underlines not simply the backwardness of Chinese tec
ogy but, more important, the fundamental difference in attitude and appro
What is more, the Chinese interest in European weaponry says little about a
intellectual curiosity. It is a commonplace of the history of technological diff
that the one thing that excites every ruler is the art of war. The Ottoman T
learned little from the West other than the making of heavy cannon, and even th
they continued to depend on European technicians. The Chinese, in seeking
make and use lighter artillery pieces, did better, but only because they borr
later, when Europe had moved on from that technology. Imitation of West
clocks showed a similar pattern: China copied objects at or near the prevail
frontier, but did not adapt or improve.
As to logic: to see this kind of partial, episodic, intermittent appropria
generally of knowledge and technique already obsolete in Europe, as eviden
an effective and continuing Chinese interest in science and technology is t
guilty of the fallacy of misplaced discreteness-to take points for a line. It m
important for reasons of self-awareness to chide European observers of the p
for the complacency and sense of superiority they derived from their scientific a
technological dominance. But it does not change the fact of dominance nor
high cost of Chinese self-sufficiency. If one is to feel superior, better to be super
or better yet, to recognize the concurrent superiority of others.
The result of this line of thought is historiography handicapped by an id
logical agenda. It tells the story that in the late eighteenth century, well before t
Western incursion brought a new immediacy to the need for military reform
Chinese were interested in technological advances and in what the West had
15 This improvement touched both the production of cannon (boring machine of Jean de Mari
the techniques of targeting and aiming. Leonhard Euler, a marvel of mathematical versatility
played a key role in the measurement of longitude by lunar distances. On the advances in artillery
Steele (1994).
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David S. Landes 21
offer. The evidence was readily available to Europeans who chose to grasp
public the Chinese denied such an interest, primarily for reasons of do
politics. Europeans, similarly influenced by developments at home, took t
as evidence of an entire mental attitude: ingrained xenophobia and a conc
resistance to progress. In the Age of Progress, such an attitude led autom
the assumption that the Chinese were inferior beings (Waley-Cohe
pp. 1543-1544).
We know better today than to entertain such an assumption. Even so,
that Western Europe caught up with and passed China, leaving it far beh
distressed numbers of Asia specialists. These have sought to exonerate Ch
sin of failure either by blaming Europe (the crimes of imperialism) or by
(delaying) the alleged Chinese shortfall, while stressing the many techn
and scientific contributions of Asia to European civilization. Among the m
and influential of this sinophilic school: Janet Abu-Lughod (1989), Andr6
Frank (1998), Kenneth Pomeranz (2000) and John Hobson (2004). Against
I would recommend a reading of the more realistic work ofJoel Mokyr an
Duchesne (2006).
It is all well and good to point to the sin of Western pride, but not by inventing or
avoiding reality. On the one hand, the Europeans could and did on occasion succumb
to the temptations of arrogance; and then to their cost. In matters of science, for
example, the French were particularly sensitive in their self-esteem and still are.6' On
balance, however, European opinion tended to rest on performance and achievement.
European scientists rarely refused to learn or copy, and they were only too ready to
revise their judgment when presented with the facts. (Scientists could also be ferociously dismissive, however, in disputes over priority.) The same for European travelers
confronted with foreign achievement. To be sure, European judgments were based too
much perhaps on their infatuation with material knowledge and achievement; hence
the tendency to measure men by their ability to use and make machines. But of course,
that is the kind of measure economists still use when we rank countries by product and
income per head. China could have used some of this.
What all of this points to is the overwhelming importance of self-respect, the
power of self-image to distort and mislead. Confronted with a near terminal case of
cultural superiority in China, the historian is tempted to play the role of comforter
and to stroke the object of his affections as the master a pet. That's all right for pets,
which don't have to grow up, but not for countries, which do.
Imperial China open-minded, curious? No way.
16 See Guerlac (1979) on the protracted French reluctance to accept Newtonian physics.
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22 Journal of Economic Perspectives
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276
ReORIENT
cycle in whose downward "B" phase one after another region and em
pire in Asia declined. Then, the previously rather marginal Europeans
and later the North Americans were able to take advantage of this Asian
cyclical "E" phase decline, like the East Asian NIBs today: it is then that
the Europeans staked out their own claim to leadership and hegemony
in the world economy- temporarily! However, not only did "the Rise
of the West" follow "the Decline of the East." The two were also other
wise structurally and cyclically dependent on each other as inextricably
interrelated parts of a single global economy. That is what I seek to
demonstrate in the following sections.
How Did the West Rise?
So how did the West rise to win this competition- tem
porarily? The introduction to this book reviewed a number of received
theories and answers, all of which allege one or another or a whole
combination of European and by extension Western exceptionalisms.
The introduction also contended that all of these theories, Marxist, We
berian, and/or whatever, are fundamentally flawed by their EurCi
centrism.
J.
M. Blaut's (I993a)
Tbe Colonizers Model of the World: Geo
grapbical Diffusionism and Eurocent'ric History analyzes a dozen of these
answers and dleir flaws chapter and verse. Our first chapter cites Goody;
Said, Bernal, Amin, Hodgson, Tibebu, and Lewis and Wigen, who also
demystify this Eurocentrism. However, they mosdy concentrate on
ideological critiques of the manifest and hidden ideologies under re
view. Also cited is my own critique (Frank 1994,
1995) of the "modern
capitalist world-economy/system" alternative proposed by Braude! and
Wallerstein. But my earlier work too is limited mostly to a critique,
although Frank and Gills (1993) offers an alternative world system inter
pretation of world history before 1500.
The historical/empirical sections of the present book demonstrate
that the real world during the period from
I400
to 1800, not to men
tion earlier, was very different from what received theory has alleged.
Eurocentric history and "classical" social theory, but also still Wal�
lerstein's «modern world-system" suppose and/or allege European pre�
dominance, which simply did not exist. Until about
1800
the world
economy was by no stretch of the imagination European-centered nor
in any significant way defined or marked by any European-born
(arid
WHY DID THE WEST WIN (TEMPORARILY ) ?
.
2.77
European-borne) "capitalism," let alone development. Still less was
there any real "capitalist development" initiated, generated, diffused, or
··
· ·· otherwise propagated or perpetrated by Europeans or the West. That
occurred only by the stretch of the Eurocentric imagination) and even
that only belatedly after the nineteenth century, as Bernal has already
emphasized. A related question then is whether there had already been
·· · · any
"capitalist
[development of]
underdevelopment."
For Latin
America and the Caribbean, that argument (Franle 1966, 1967) can
probably still stand, and perhaps for the slave trade regions of Africa as
• • . ·. well
.
The argument was that
in India, this process only began after the
Battle of Plassey in 1757 (Frank 1975, 1978a). However, this historical
review does raise some question as to what extent the Indian and other
Asian decline was "imposed" by Europe, not to mention by "capi
· talism."
For, the data in the preceding sections have shown unequivocally
that the world economy was preponderantly Asian-based. Europeans
had been clamoring to attach themselves to it for centuries before Co
lumbus and Vasco da Gama, which is what propelled them to seek
some, any, and especially a golden way to do so in the first place. And
yet for centuries after these European (not worldl ) pioneers, other Eu
topeans still only clambered very belatedly, slowly, and marginally to
attach themselves to the Asian economic train .
Only in the nineteenth
century did they succeed in finding a place in the locomotive.
CLIMBING UP ON ASIAN SHOULDERS
So how did the West rise? The answer, literally in a word,
is that the Europeans bought themselves a seat, and then even a whole
railway car, on the Asian train. How were any-literally- poor Europe
ans able to afford the price of even a third-class ticket to board the Asian
economic train? Well, the Europeans somehow found and/or stole, ex
torted, or earned the money to do so. Again, how so?
The basic answer is two-fold, or three-fold. The mOst impoltant an
sWer is that Europeans obtained the money from the gold and silver
mines they found in the Americas. The secondary answer is that they
�'made" more money, in the very good business first of digging up that
silver-or more accurately, obliging the indigenous peoples of the
Americas to dig it up for the Europeans. The Europeans also engaged
iIi a . variety of other profitable businesses they ran in- and to- the
Americas. These were first and foremost the slave plantations in Brazil,
the Caribbean, and the North American South; and, of course, the slave
trade itself to supply and run these plantations. The Europeans em
ployed and exploited perhaps a million workers at any one time in this
profitable business, by Blaut's estimate (1993a: 195). Europeans were
able to make still more money selling their own European-made prod
ucts to these and other people
in the Americas, products for which Eue
rope otherwise would have found no other market, since they were not
competitively salable in Asia.
The Keynesian multiplier did however operate also in Europe, first
through the infusion of the American-derived money itself, and then
also
through the repatriation and investment in Europe of profits from
the Americas, Mrica, and from the "triangular" -including especially
the slave-trade among them. Of course, Europe also derived profits
from the aforementioned European production and export of its goodS
to the Americas and Africa. All these European sources of and machines ·
for finding and making money have been alluded to in the earlier empir
ical sections of this book. They need not be elaborated on here, because
they have already been researched and demonstrated countless times
over, without however seeing some of their implications nor drawing
the necessary conclusions, outlined below.
In order to avoid a tedious recounting or Marx's language of "capital
dripping
with
blood and sweat," it should be sufficient to allude to
everybody'S favorite observer, Adam Smith:
Since the first discovery of America, the market for the produce
of its silver mines has been growing gradually more and more
extensive. First, the market of Europe has become mote extensive.
Since the discovery of America, the greater part of Europe has
improved. England, Holland, France and Germany; even Swe
den, Denmark and Russia have all advanced considerably both in
agriculture and manufactures. .
Secondly, America is itself a
new market for the produce of its own silver mines; and as it
advances in agriculture, industry and population . . . its demand
must increase much more rapidly. The English colonies are
alto
gether a new market. .
The discovery of America, however
made a most essential [contribution]. By opening up a new and
inexhaustible market to all commodities of Europe, it gave occa
sion to a new division of labour and improvements of art, which,
in the narrow circle of ancient commerce could never have taken
place for want of a market to take off the greater part of their
produce. The productive powers of labour were improved, and
WHY DID THE WEST WIN (TEMPORARILY) ?
279
its produce increased in all the different countries of Europe, and
together with it the real revenue and wealth of the inhabitants.
(Smith
[1776]1 937 = 202, 416)
As Smith knew, it was America (in a word) that accounted for the in
crease in the real revenue and wealth of the inhabitants of Europe.
Moreover, Smith repeatedly argues that even Poland, Hungary, and
other parts of Europe that did not trade with the Americas directly,
nonetheless also derived indirect benefit for their own industries from
die same. Moreover of course, as Ken Pomeranz
(1997) emphasizes and
analyzes, the European exploitation of native, bonded labor and slave
labor imported from Mrica in combination with the resources of tlle
.Americas not only afforded Europe additional resources for its own
Consumption and investment but also lightened the pressure on scarce
resources in Europe itself.
Smith also recognized Asia as being economically far more advanced
and richer than Europe. "The improvements in agriculture and manu
factUres seem likewise to have been of very great antiquity in the prov
inces of Bengal in the East Indies, and in some of the eastern provinces
bf China. . . Even those three countries [China, Egypt, and Indostan] ,
the wealthiest, according to all accounts, that ever were in the world,
are chiefly renowned for their superiority in agriculture and manufac
tures . . . . [Now, in 1776] China is a much richer country than any part
of Europe" (Smith [1776]1937 : 20, 348, 169).
Moreover, Smith also understood how the poor Europeans were able
to use their new money and increased wealth to buy themselves tickets
. on the Asian train. Continuing with the third point in his discussion
excerpted above, Smith writes:
Thirdly, the East Indies [Asia] is another market for the produce
of the silver mines of America, and a market which, from the time
of the discovery of those mines, has been continually taking off a
greater and greater quantity of silver.
Upon all these accounts,
the precious metals are a commodity which it always has been,
and still continues to be, extremely advantageous to carry from
Europe to India. There is scarce any commoditY which brings a
better price there [and it is even more advantageous to carry silver
to China] . .
The silver of the new continent seems in this man
ner to be one of the principal commodities by which the com
merce between the two extremities of the old one is carried on,
and it is by means of it, in great measure, that those distant parts
of the world are connected with one another. . . . The trade to the
280
ReORIENT
East Indies, by opening a market to the
commodities of Europe,
which is pur
chased with those commodities, must necessarily tend to increase
the annual production of European commodities. . . Europe, in
stead of being the manufacturers and carriers for but a small part
of the world .
have now [1776] become the manufacturers for
the numerous and thriving cultivators of America, and the carri
ers, and in some respect the manufacturers too, for almost all the
different nations of Asia, Mrica, and America. ( Smith [1776]1937:
206, 207, 417, 591; my emphasis )
01; whra comes to the same thing, the gold and silver
The Asian market for the Europeans was the same thing as silver, as
Smith remarked, for t';vo related re as ons : One is that silver was their
only means ofpayment. The other is that therefore the Europeans' main
business was the production and trade of silver as a commodity itself.
That was the main source of the profits Europeans derived from their
trade both within Asia and between Asia and Europe.
Braudel declares himself "astonished," "as a historian of the Mediter
ranean," to find that the late eighteenth-century Red Sea trade was still
the same "vital channel" in the outflow of Spanish-American silver to
India and beyond as in the sixteenth century. This influx of precious
metal was vital to the movements of the most active sector of the In
dian, and no doubt Chinese economy" (Braudel 1992: 491). India "had
in fact been for centuries subject to a money economy, partly through
her links with the Mediterranean world" (Braudel 1992: 498) . "Cambay
(another name for Gujarat) could only survive, it was said, by stretclling
out its arm to Aden and the other to MaIacca" (Braudel 1992: 528). Gold
and silver "were also the indispensable mechanisms which made the
whole great machine function, from its peasant base to the summit of
society and the business world" (Braudel 1992: 500) . Braudel himself
concludes that "in the end, the Europeans had to have recourse to the
precious metals, particularly American silver, which was the 'open ses
ame' of these trades" (Braudel 1992: 217) . "From the start, Spanish
America had inevitably been a decisive element in world history"
perhaps the tme explanation
(Braudel 1992: 414). "Is not America
of Europe's greatness?" (Braudel 1992: 387).
Precisely that is also the explanation ofBlaut (1977, 1992, 1993a), who
in all these regards seems to be the modern alter ego of Adaill Smith.
Both understand and explain the first two answers to the question of
how the poor Europeans managed access to the thriving Asian market:
(1) they used their American money, and (2) they used the profits of
both their production/imports from and their exports to America and
"
WHY DID THE WEST WIN (TEMPORARILY ) ?
281
Africa, and their investment of the proceeds of all of these in Europe
itself.
However, the third answer alluded to above is that Europeans also
used both the American silver money and their profits to buy into the
wealth of Asia itself. As Smith noted, and all the evidence reviewed
above shows, Europe used its commodities, or what comes to the same
thing, the only commodities it could sell in Asia, that is its American
gold and silver, to buy Asian products. Moreover, as also documented
above, Europe used its silver purchasing power to muscle in on the
intra-Asian trade, which the Europeans called "country trade." As noted
above, it was the silver- and gold-trade itself that was really the main
stay of the European companies. Consider for instance this summary of
Dutch VOC strategy:
The European precious metals, the Japanese silver obtained
mainly against Chinese silk and other goods, and the gold ob
tained in Taiwan mainly against Japanese silver and Indonesian
pepper were invested primarily in Indian textiles. These textiles
were exchanged largely for Indonesian pepper and other spices
but also sent to Europe and various Asian factories. The bulk of
the pepper and other spices was exported to Europe but a certain
amount [was] used for investment in various Asian factories such
as those in India, Persia, Taiwan and Japan. Raw silk from Persia
and China also found its way to Europe.
The pattern of Dutch
participation in intra-Asian trade was detennined in part by the
requirements of the trade with Japan which was by far the most
important Asian source of precious metals for the Company dur
ing the seventeenth century.
In certain years precious metals
procured in Japan were of greater value than those received at
Batavia from Holland. (Prakesh 1994: 1-192, 193)
More graphical still is a frequently quoted description of Dutch trade
in 1619 from VOC director Jan Pieterswn Coen himself:
Piece goods from Gujarat we can barter for pepper and gold on
the coast of Sumatra; rials and cottons from the coast [of Coro
mandel] for pepper in Bantam; sandalwood, pepper and rials we
can barter for Chinese goods and Chinese gold; we can extract
silver from Japan with Chinese goods; piece goods from tlle Cor
omandel coast in exchange for spices, other goods and gold from
China; piece goods from Surat for spices; other goods and rials
from Arabia for spices and various other trifles -one thing leads
to another. And all of it can be done without any money from the
Netherlands and with ships alone. We have the most important
282
ReORIENT
spices already. What is missing then? Nothing else but ships and
a little water to prime the pump. .
(By this I mean sufficient
means [money] so that the rich Asian trade may be established.)
Hence, gentlemen and good administrators, there is nothing to
prevent the Company from acquiring the richest trade in the
world. (quoted in Steensgaard 1987: 139 and by Kindleberger
1989, who cites Steensgaard I973 [same as 1972] but writes "suffi
cient money" and omits the last-and for present purposes the
most significant-sentence! )
That is, Europeans sought to muscle in o n «the richest trade in the world} »
but it took the Dutch rather more than just "a little water [meaning
money]" to pump this Asian well of treasures and capital, and of course
that money came from the Americas. Thus, Europeans derived 1mre
profits from their participation in the intra-Asian "country trade" than
they did from their Asian imports into Europe, even though many of
the latter in tum generated further profits for them as re-exports to
Africa and the Americas. So the Europeans were able to profit from the
much more productive and wealthy Asian economies by participating
in the intra-Asian trade; and that in turn they were able to do ultimately
only thanks to their American silver.
Without that silver- and, secondarily, without the division of labor
and profits it generated in Europe itself- the Europeans would not
have had a leg, or even a single toe, to stand on with which to compete
in the Asian market. Only their American money, and not any "excep
tional" European "qualities," which, as Smith realized even in 1776, had
not been even remotely up to Asian standards, permitted the Europeans
to buy their ticket on the Asian economic train and/or to talee a third
class seat on it. That is looking at this European "business" in Asia
from the demand side. The concomitant supply side, emphasized by··
Pomeranz (1997), is of course that their American money permitted the
Europeans to buy real goods, produced with real labor and resources
in Asia. These goods not only increased consumption and investment
beyond what it otherwise could and would have been in Europe; they
also diminished the pressure on resources in Europe itself.
To refer to another analogy, their American-supplied stakes permit
ted the Europeans an entry into the Asian economic casino. Why were
they ultimately able to prosper there? Only because of their unending,
albeit fluctuating, flow of American silver and gold. That is what pro
vided the Europeans with their one competitive advantage among their
Asian competitors, for these did not have money growing on Americari.
trees. However, even with that resource and advantage, the Europeans
WHY DID THE WEST WIN (TEMPORARILY)?
:1.83
\¥eie no more than a minor bit player at the Asian, indeed world, eco
hdtn1C table. Yet the Europeans gambled their American stakes for all
.they were worth in Asia and held out there for three centuries. Even
. though the Europeans also reinvested some of their Asian earnings to
.ibliy iilto
still more and better seats at the Asian economic table, they
> \vere able to continue doing so only because their supply of cash was
!Xing continually replenished from the Americas. Witness that even in
the eighteenth century, the Europeans had nothing else to offer any
Asians, for European manufactures were still not competitive. How
ever, Smith exaggerated worldwide sales of European manufactures,
hnless we read his qualification of "to some extent" as meaning almost
.... nothing.
i
Certainly, the Europeans had no exceptional, let alone superior, eth
. >tJ.iS rational, organizational, or spirit-of-capitalist advantages to offer,
diffuse, or do anything else in Asia. What the Europeans may have had,
we will consider further below and in our conclusions, is some of
:is
what Alexander Gerschenkron's
�ardness"
(1962) calls the advantages of "back(1997)
afforded by their position, as Chase-DUIUl and Hall
also observe, at the (semi-)periphery of the world economy!
So how is it that this otherwise apparently hopeless European gam
•
···. ble in Asia panned out - and finally hit the jackpot? Only because while
·
. .
..• . .
..
.•
.
.
the Europeans were gathering strength from the Americas and Africa,
as well as from Asia itself, Asian economies and polities were also be
coming weakened during part of the eighteenth century-so much so
that the paths finally crossed, as in Rhoades Murphey's
at about
•
(1977) diagram,
1815. However, in the half century before that, another-
fourth-element entered into the European/Asian equation. Adam
Smith is also known for arguing that colonies did not pay, even though
< he wrote a chapter "On Colonies" and argued primarily against colonial
monopolies. Moreover, Smith wrote just before the major technologi -
cal inventions and innovations of the industrial revolution in Britain
and Europe. This is not the place to enter into the arguments about
:Whether there really was such a "revolution" and whether European
rates of capital accumulation really did
Purchase answer to see full
attachment